NNC Stories

On Friday, October 26th, Mayor Darrell Steinberg answered questions about Measure U, a tax plan will renew the same tax instituted in 2012 as well as adding an additional half-cent, creating a one-cent tax.

It was an opportunity for the community, especially South Sacramento Youth, to voice their opinions and ask questions about the proposed tax. Mayor Steinberg, as a vocal supporter of Measure U, focused on the benefits of this proposal.

“Measure U is a once in a generation opportunity to invest in Sacramento’s future, I believe this city has unlimited potential to grow in the right way and to extend the benefits of our growth to all of our neighborhoods,” said Mayor Steinberg.

However, many people who are on a fixed income don’t agree. Some argue that it will burden the poor and homeless who have to pay a higher tax to give up some of their necessities that they need to survive.

“We currently don’t have the financial capacity to invest in high wage jobs creation and affordable housing, and a sustained effort to reduce homelessness and in our young people, Measure U will give us the opportunity to do all of that,” Mayor Steinberg stated.

Mayor Steinberg claims Measure U will fix all the problems that it’s opponents say it creates. It’s also important to remember as well that Measure U is a general tax, and one doesn’t really have specifics as to what it will do as a specific tax needs a 2/3 vote to pass.

So what will you do? No matter what your side is on this issue, it’s important to go out and vote!

Recently, the New York Times published an article speaking on the situation of transgender and gender non-conforming erasure. The article said that “The Trump administration is considering narrowly defining gender as a biological, immutable condition determined by genitalia at birth, the most drastic move yet in a governmentwide effort to roll back recognition and protections of transgender people under federal civil rights law.”

Many transgender and gender non-conforming people feel as though they are already harassed by people around them and are now are being targeted by the government. Although transgender, gender non-conforming and allies are taking to the streets, the biggest location that need people to be to make change is at the voting polls.

In California and other progressive states, there has been a big push for voting the people who are hurting minorities out of office. Through Instagram, libraries, celebrities and more, people over the age of eighteen have been urged to register to vote and to show up the polls on November 6th. Not only have people eighteen and older been told to register, but people sixteen and younger have been urged to pre-register, so that as soon as they are eighteen, they can vote.

Many people have noticed the lack of representation in elected office of the people being affected by these changes. There are not many transgender and gender non-conforming candidates running in elections. People often feel as though it is because of fear of bigots that they do not run. Arabesque Lynaolu, a student and activist, finds this to be truly troubling.

“I feel that if transgender or non-conforming candidates were to run, that they would have to be careful, but I do think that it is important for them to run because it would give visibility.”

On Wednesday, October 3rd, Sacramento State hosted an event called “How To Be a Better Ally” to help people understand how to be a better ally towards those who are transgender.

This event focused on things like how to respect other’s pronouns, understand what other people are going through and also teaches about gender and sexuality. Sacramento State hosted this event through a community partner, The Gender Health Center.

“This workshop trains how people, organizations and spaces can provide support, safety and allyship to the trans community,” Keyko Torres said in the beginning of her presentation.

Students, community members and allies who attended the workshop provided an open and welcoming space. Topics like gender, fluidity, and respect were discussed. The space was non-judgemental and open to questions.

Workshops like this one help provide support to the trans community and their allies. Institutions, especially universities, need to provide resources to the different communities that they host.

For example, changing names on official documents has proven very difficult for many members of the transgender community. This has a huge impact on emotional health.

In 2017, the Association of American Colleges and Universities reported that “52.1 percent of incoming transgender college students reported their emotional health as either below average or in the lowest 10 percent relative to their peers,” according to the findings of Ellen Barza Stollenzberg from the Higher Education research institute of California, Los Angeles.

It is clear that universities need to do more for the transgender community, workshops like this one are definitely a step in the right direction. But, so many believe more can be done. What can we do to be better allies?

For some, this is an obvious answer- “Provide resources for transgender people and listen to them,” Torres said during the workshop.

On October 31st the Sacramento BHC is hosting their 7th annual Boys and Men of Color (BMoC) Sacramento Summit. This event will take place at the Sacramento State University Ballroom starting early in the day at 9:00 AM at last until 4:00 PM.

“The BMoC Sacramento Summit is an annual full-day event which is focused on galvanizing community power and inspiring youth action,” said the Sacramento BHC, regarding what the event was about. “The purpose of the summit is to create system change by mobilizing young people and inspiring dialogue between youth activists and local leaders.”

With the upcoming midterm elections, it’s important for young people to come together at events such as the BMoC. Participants are being encouraged to use the hashtag #staywoke during this event and to speak on issues such as social justice, police brutality, and “schools not prisons”.

In California, with help from the California Endowment, student suspensions have been steadily decreasing with numbers as high as 400,000 fewer suspensions annually. Events like this help spread accurate information and provide forms of action for people to take part in, especially for youth. 11 other states in the U.S. have passed laws that help aid in the fight against the school to prison pipeline, following California’s lead.

The Sacramento BHC hopes to continue the momentum and spread more awareness about issues surrounding youth all while including the young people in the process.

To learn more about this event and how it helps the surrounding community of Sacramento please visit HERE.

According to newly released data, there has been a huge decrease in the number of youth incarcerated across California over the past decade. Programs that target at-risk youth and their families are working, despite the predictions made by some political figures a decade ago. The California Prison system has been able to decrease the amount of youth that come into the system by easing laws and procedures when it comes to youth and making the quality of their life outside of jail or school a priority, rather than only reprimanding youth for crimes.

According to Chief Probation Officer Adolfo Gonzales of the San Diego County, just 311 youth are being held inside the county’s prisons and camps, the same camps which held 1,008 youth in 2010. This plummet has not only taken place in the San Diego, but in counties all across California.

In 2002, 4,212 youth were incarcerated in Los Angeles; this year, Los Angeles holds 1,250 incarcerated youth. In Sacramento County, those numbers went from 590 youth in 2006 to just 215 youth today.

A study done by MIT scholar Joseph Doyle back in 2015 focused on the effects of youth incarceration. The study found that juvenile incarceration decreases the probability of youth completing high school and increased the probability of youth entering the prison system as adults.

Sacramento County, along with many other counties in California, are changing their focus when it comes to handling at-risk youth because they are finding positive change in the work that they have been doing now within the past decade.

“When I came here over a decade ago, it was the height of overcrowding in the California Prison System. You didn’t have enough staff, there was very little rehabilitative programming. I was committed to not repeating those mistakes,” says Sacramento County Chief Probation Officer Lee Seale.

Sacramento County’s Juvenile Hall was just recognized nationally by receiving the 2018 Performance-Based Standards Barbara Allen-Hagen Award. The award was created to honor Barbara Allen-Hagen, an advocate for improving juvenile hall facilities. This is Sacramento’s third time winning this award in the past seven years, according to SacCounty News.

The Sacramento Juvenile Hall also partnered with the Boys & Girls Club of Greater Sacramento in June of 2014. Last August, the Sacramento Youth Detention Facility was recognized as one of the top ten national finalists in a Boys & Girls Clubs of America contest.

“The Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater Sacramento juvenile hall program focuses on supporting the kids that truly need us the most by providing hope, opportunity, and programs designed to ensure our members are empowered to make good choices and stay on a positive path towards a productive future,” said CEO Kimberly Key of Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater Sacramento.

After Prop 21 was passed in 2001, a proposition that aimed to bring more youth offenders into the adult criminal justice system and increase penalties for youth, more funding was put into crime prevention.

“It is collaborative efforts with our officers, community-based organizations, the courts, counselors, and educators that are having a major impact in the “rehabilitation” of minors that have crossed into the justice system,” says Coleen Kincheloe, Assistant Chief Deputy of the Sacramento Probation Department.

According to a recent poll commissioned by Power California, 72% of California youth aged 18 to 24 say they “definitely will” vote in November but only 16% of that same age group voted in the June primaries. This causes many to wonder what is causing this disconnect with youth and voting.

Many young people have their own opinions on voting, and it’s not that they aren’t politically aware, it’s just that many have lost faith in the system or simply don’t know what steps to take to be registered to vote.

“If Hillary and Trump were running again, no I wouldn’t vote, politics are just messed up on both sides,” says 16-year-old William Oosterman of Sacramento.

Youth voter turnout is also an issue that needs to be confronted. In the Power California Polls, around 70% of the youth who voted in the June primary said they were contacted by email or text reminding them to vote. But just reminding young people to vote isn’t always enough.

Young voters need to connect to the candidates and issues they are voting for. Increasingly, more and more youth are supporting groups like Black Lives Matter and are the majority of attendees at protests and boycotts. When a candidate speaks out about an issue that matters to them, an increased number of younger voters show up to the polls.

“Yes I would vote!” says Mason Johnson, a young potential voter in California. “People’s opinions can potentially change the future of the country.”

It is the future of the country that young people are worried about and have set out to change. Some, like Johnson, have not lost hope and continue to fight for a country they can be proud of. Others no longer believe voting has a purpose. Voter education and contact, such as reminders, are just some steps that need to be taken to increase voter turnout among youth.

The acclaimed AccessLocal.TV youth journalism training program from Access Sacramento, now in its eighth year, continues to showcase how young people can make a difference in their community.

One of the writers, Arabella Meza, recently joined the steering committee for a Winter Conference being planned in Sacramento sponsored by The California Endowment.

This current group of six trainees is being particularly productive. Not only are they writing articles, posting pictures, and creating videos for the website AccessLocal.Tv and Access Sacramento’s cable channels, they’re also getting statewide attention.

AccessLocal.Tv writer Arthur Kunert shows a print from the San Francisco Chronicle that printed his comments about Climate Change.

Writer Arthur Kunert recently had a short opinion piece he wrote about Climate Change printed by the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper. The short write-up was included in a composite of short responses from youth writers across the state.

It’s not the first time for AccessLocal.Tv content to get picked up my other media or websites. Since the Access Sacramento training program is funded in large part by a grant from The California Endowment, its youth media network regularly uses AccessLocal.Tv content in its newsletters shared across California to promote youth who improve their communities by sharing healthy-living outcomes.

All members of the youth team creates content for a monthly AccessLocal.Tv television show that airs on Channel 17. The program manager for the project is Isaac Gonzalez who provides the training on writing, photography, video editing and social media.

Former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick just became the face of a Nike ad campaign and for many upset football fans a reason to burn Nike products.

Nike is celebrating its 30th anniversary. On Monday, September 3rd, Nike released an ad for their “Just Do It” campaign in celebration of the anniversary featuring a photo of Kaepernick, an activist for racial injustice, that reads, “Believe in something, even if it means sacrificing everything.”

Starting in 2016, Kaepernick kneeled during the national anthem to protest against the oppression of people of color and police brutality in the United States.

The ex-NFL player sparked a fire of controversy, literally, over what some believed was disrespectful to the troops who have fought for the U.S.

“I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color,” said Colin in 2016, according to the NFL. “To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.”

The hashtags #boycottnike and #justburnit have flooded social media, with pictures and videos of people cutting off the Nike swoosh from their socks or lighting their Nike’s on fire. Setting shoes on fire to protest the views of the ex-football player didn’t seem to decrease the company’s sales. In fact, Nike sales have gone up by 31% since the photo’s release, according to NBC News.

Kaepernick claims that his intentions were never to disrespect the people who have fought for this country. After making the compromise to kneel instead of sitting down during the anthem with Nate Boyer, a former Army Green Beret and player for the NFL, Kaepernick spoke to reporters about his conversation with Boyer.

“We were talking to [Boyer] about how we can get the message back on track and not take away from the military, not take away from fighting for our country, but keep the focus on what the issues really are,” said Kaepernick. “And as we talked about it, we came up with taking a knee. Because there are issues that still need to be addressed and it was also a way to show more respect to men and women who fought for this country.”

After telling the media over the years that he does support the military and stated his intentions for protesting racial injustice, some Nike owners still continue to boycott the brand.

As for Nike, the $28 billion brand, according to Brand Finance, marketing strategies like this have seem to show much success.

With the 31 percent increase in the brands sales, some say this is just another way for a big corporation such as Nike to make more money, having in mind that talk about social justice is on the rise.

“That is difficult as Nike supports child labor and social justice is somewhat on trend,” says Cian Ward, a Sacramento artist and activist. “That being said it is important for larger scale corporations to recognize the struggle and give it some more attention.”

Another Sacramento resident, Izzy Ignacio, who is a writer and a student, agrees that Nike didn’t take a risk at all, but people should not react in the extreme ways that are taking place.

“I think it’s fine and I don’t understand why people are getting worked up about it; he started a movement, no matter what your point of view on it is,” said Ignacio. “It is still a movement. Financially, it’s not even a big risk to Nike, they’ve always been sort of progressive and they have lots of money and their customers have always mostly been younger people and younger people at the moment are mostly liberal/progressive/democratic so it makes sense why they would use him.”

“We wanted to energize its meaning and introduce ‘Just Do It’ to a new generation of athletes,” Gino Fisanotti, the Vice President of Nike told ESPN.

Regardless of people’s opinions and urges to destroy shoes and clothes that could actually just be donated to children in need, Nike is still the world’s most valuable apparel brand.